Choosing to Live After My Husband’s Death

At first, time was divided between “before the diagnosis” and “after the diagnosis.” That time period lasted 11 months, 9 days. Then time for me became divided between before Mike’s death and after.

The problem was that I never thought Mike would die. Even during that last month when the certainty of death was inevitable, I wouldn’t allow myself to believe it. I was certain beyond certain that a miracle would occur and he would be healed.

Mike and I met while working at a university. I was part of the tech team and he was a professor — the youngest one in the department. We met and married later than most — we were both in our mid-thirties. People throw the word “soulmate” around carelessly, but we were soulmates. I knew the first day I met him that we would be together and just as strongly I knew that he would not die, despite what the doctors told us early on after his diagnosis of colon cancer.

We had two daughters. Sarah was 9 and Maddie was 6 when Mike died. Well meaning friends would tell me how lucky I was to have the girls — that being busy raising them would help me to forget. Forget? Forget what? I saw Mike in the eyes of my oldest and in the mannerisms of my youngest. I saw him in their spirit and their stubbornness. I saw him in their speech and in the way they problem-solved, almost effortlessly. Just like him. And I was glad. A very real part of Mike would continue.

Despite my disbelief and my sorrow, which eventually tumbled into depression, I never seriously considered suicide. My girls were depending on me to carry on. So every day I got up and got them to school and went to work and carried on.

One day about a year after Mike’s death I got a call from Sarah’s school. It was the school nurse and she said that Sarah was “acting funny.” When I questioned her about what that meant she said, “We called an ambulance. You need to go to Children’s Hospital.” Terrified, I asked a co-worker to drive me the short distance between the university and Children’s.

There, I found a nurse at my daughter’s bedside taking her vitals. “We think she had a seizure,” the nurse said in a matter of fact way. “The neurologist on call has been paged.” I remember thinking how odd it was that she was so calm. But then again this is what she did for a living. No different, I suppose than how I am calm when a student bursts into my office terrified that he has accidentally deleted the data he has collected over the past year, frantically asking, "Can you get it back?"

In that instant, I woke up from the going-through-the-motions state that Mike’s death had left me. At that moment, I didn’t know what it meant for my daughter to have had a seizure but I knew that when Mike died I had stopped living. As I watched my daughter being hooked up for an EEG, I made a silent commitment to bring the joy back into our household, because my daughters deserved it and so did I. Any moment could be our last and I didn’t want to sleep-walk through my children’s childhood.

Within the next few months the girls and I made a Joy List — a concept similar to a bucket list, but instead of the underlying connotation of death, it was all about living — with joy. On the list I added two items that I always wanted to learn how to do: scuba dive and fly. Learning to dive was as simple as taking a three month long course. Flying was a bit more challenging; it took me almost 6 years to get my private pilot’s license.

I believe that choosing to fully live after my husband’s death saved me from the downward spiral that I had found myself in and gave my daughters their only chance to heal the hole left by their dad’s death, too.

Maddie is entering high school this fall and Sarah will be a senior. Maddie plays the clarinet and sax and will soon be taking up the flute. She is also taking Mandarin and French and is on the cross country team. Sarah, taking after her mom, is on the tech team and has started a side business teaching seniors in our community about social media. Although she continues to be monitored by her neurologist, she has not had another seizure since the one she had that day, seven years ago.